Welcome to Home of Visual Cognition Laboratory

The Visual Cognition Lab does research concerned with scene perception and its real world applications.  We investigate how people perceive, attend to, and remember scenes and the objects in them, thus spanning the traditional areas of perception and cognition.  The scope of our research is best understood in terms of the time course of perception and mental representation of a scene.  First, how is it that within the first tenth of a second of viewing a scene we can grasp its category, easily distinguishing an office versus a parking lot versus a park?  Next, as we proceed to observe such a scene, what causes us to look at certain objects, and ignore others?  Then, what effect does the temporal order of looking at particular objects in a scene, for example a coffee mug, have on our later memory for that object versus other objects in the scene, for example a calculator?  Our lab research philosophy is that good basic research should always be capable of suggesting applications and good applied research should always inform theory.  Our applied work focuses on issues related to the human factors of gaze-contingent multi-resolutional displays and content-based image retrieval.  

You are visitor number